


A Letter to my Past Self

by PlayerProphet



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Therapy, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28193811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlayerProphet/pseuds/PlayerProphet
Summary: Cheryl Heather Mason is in group therapy and is assigned to write a letter to her past self. Instead, she gets a new friend to drive her to KFC.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Letter to my Past Self

**Author's Note:**

  * For [100indecisions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions/gifts).



> Since Heather accepts the name "Cheryl" at the end of SH3, that's how I refer to her here. Sorry if it's confusing! I imagine this fic takes place around 2005, a couple years after SH 2 and 3.

"This weekend I want everyone to take some time and write a letter to your past self," the counselor says, her voice soft and comforting as if everyone in the room might be startled by any loud noises or sudden movement. "There's no wrong way to do this. It can be your past self from last week, or to yourself during a particularly difficult event. What would you say to a younger you? What would they need to hear? We might read some of them on Monday, but no one's forced to do that. Just write at least a page, and we'll go over what we wrote next week."

 _Dear Alessa,_ Cheryl composes silently, _get your crazy sister not to kill my Dad. Thanks._

Cheryl was early into the day program at the state health department, and it wasn't her first time. Therapists wanted you to be honest and present about feelings and trauma, but Cheryl could never be completely honest. If she explained to anyone that she was the divided soul god baby of a Virgin Mary-type cult icon who also had the memories of a previous life in her head, she'd be locked up and they'd throw away the key. And then what would any of it have been for? Alessa died so Cheryl could shut the hell up and be free. So Cheryl in turn locks the truth into her heart, never to be discussed with anyone but Douglas. It helps to have someone to remind her it wasn't all a twisted hallucination.

Cheryl steps out of the building and into a downpour. She tucks herself under the overhang and glances at the assignment sheet as she searches her pockets for a pack of cigarettes. Finding them, she tucks the papers under her arm and searches for a lighter. The exit door opens.

The woman who emerges outside has a cigarette in her own mouth, and she lights it up with one a plain red plastic bic that you get at every gas station. 

“Hey,” Cheryl calls to her, and she starts like you just jumped out from the bushes. “Can I get a light?”

“Oh,” she murmurs, stuttering and unable to meet Cheryl’s eyes. “Okay.”

The woman hands the lighter to Cheryl and lets her light herself up. "Thanks." 

Cheryl takes a long drag, savors it, and tosses the lighter back. The woman jolts again, startled, and catches the tiny lighter with her whole body, folding over it and nearly dropping her cigarette in the process. She avoids Cheryl's eyes as if Cheryl is a moody dog with a penchant for biting faces. She seems content to stand in silence, ignoring Cheryl and gazing out at the rain as it falls in sheets.

The woman has got about ten years on Cheryl, maybe. There are fine wrinkles around her eyes and on the edges of her mouth. Her hair is black, but Cheryl admires the few strands of grey laced through at her temples. Her outfit makes it clear she doesn't care what she wears -- sneakers with a pair of jeans, rustic orange turtleneck with a windbreaker ten years out of fashion on top. She has a tiny backpack and no umbrella. It occured to Cheryl that she was looking at a woman who was well and truly depressed, someone whose medication hadn't done a damn thing to pull her out of a bottomless hole.

"What did you do?"

The woman looks up at Cheryl, eyes meeting for half a heartbeat before darting away. "Wh-what?"

"This is basically prison for crazy people, so I assume you did something to get thrown in here. What was it?" 

"We're not supposed to talk about that..." she struggles a bit to get the words out, falling over herself.

"Yeah, well. We're not supposed to smoke, either." Cheryl takes a drag and exhales, and in that time the woman says nothing. "I'll go first. Some poor dude followed me from the subway. I freaked out thinking he was a stalker and beat him with an empty trash can. Turns out, he lived in the same building as me and was going home in the same direction. Now he's paralyzed and I have to explain that to my past self. I'm Cheryl, by the way."

The woman glances up again and looks Cheryl over, as if appraising her for ulterior motives. "Angela."

"Nice to meet you, in spite of the circumstances. So?"

Angela seems in no hurry to respond as she takes a drag from her cigarette. She speaks, holding the smoke in her lungs: "I... I killed my father and..." she exhales, "my brother. They abused me. Then I ran. I got into my car, and... disappeared for three years. S-someone found me walking along the shoulder of a highway... a few months ago."

"Whoa. What were you doing for three years?"

"I don't know." Her tone is familiar. It's not that she doesn't _know_ as much as that she isn't _sure._ Cheryl understands perfectly.

"Cool," she says.

"Not really," Angela replies. She pulls her cigarette to the nub and steps it out on the pavement. She appraises the rain, and when she puts her hand into her windbreaker pocket, it jingles. _She has a car. The same car she ran away in?_

"You have a car?" Cheryl asks, and Angela's hair bobs as she turns to look at her. "Can I hitch a ride? I'm not too far from here, but I didn't bring an umbrella."

Angela stares at Cheryl, calculating her threat level. Cheryl wonders how she must appear to this sad anxious fawn of a woman, with her denim cropped jacket, combat boots, and a line of piercings in her ears. Maybe Cheryl looks like the kind of girl who is going to put a body in Angela's trunk and drag her along on a cross-country road trip running from the cops. Cheryl loves to make people older than her anxious, but she feels sorry for this one. Angela looks like she might die of a heart attack if Cheryl moves too quickly, or is apathy a shield against her fears?

"Swing by KFC and I'll buy dinner," says Cheryl.

This breaks Angela from her thoughts. "We're not s-supposed to talk outside of group..."

"We won't be talking. We'll be eating."

A heartbeat. "Okay."

Cheryl flicks the butt of her cigarette into a puddle, and runs through the rain with Angela.

* * *

"I read in a magazine that, in Japan, they eat KFC at Christmas," Cheryl says, peeling a strip of heavily spiced skin from a strip of fried chicken. "It was a magazine outside of Dr Meisner's office. I had to go there this morning. I've had a craving ever since."

Cheryl and Angela sit in the front of Angela's shitty car in the parking lot of the combination KFC and Taco Bell, watching the rain smear reality along the windshield. It makes the car feel like a tiny, intimate room.

"What?" Angela echoes the disbelief Cheryl felt hours earlier when she'd read it in the first place. "KFC?"

"I know I read it, and there were photos. The magazine is still up there. You can go see it yourself tomorrow." The words leave Cheryl's mouth before she realizes how revealing they are. _I basically just told her I don't trust my own perception of reality._

Cheryl kicks take-out cups around the floor of the car as she leans back in the passenger's seat. She's sure that Angela didn't pay more than five hundred dollars for that deathtrap, and it's full of garbage and smells like cigarettes. Angela apologized endlessly for the mess, and does so again, but Cheryl doesn't care. If she had a car, it would probably be identical, but with a nail bat on the back seat.

"They also eat cake for Christmas," Cheryl puts words between the present and the things she admitted. "It's, like, a couple's holiday. Like Valentine's Day."

" _What?"_

"I know!" Cheryl laughs. Angela's genuine disbelief seems to crack her shell and let a light shine through, giving a glimpse of who Angela is underneath her sadness. "If someone brought me a cake for Christmas, I'd marry them on the spot."

"I-i-is that a decision you're making with your... Wise Mind?"

The group therapy jargon is enough to send Cheryl into hysterics, which is only a fraction as rewarding as the slight quirk of a smile that appears on Angela's mouth. 

In an effort to come up with an excellent follow-up to Angela's joke, Cheryl gets lost, remembering the assignment. _A letter to my past self._

"Speaking of Christmas, you got plans?"

The guarded look on Angela's face tells Cheryl everything she needs to know. Something about that look tugs at Cheryl's heartstrings. "It's... it's still October."

"Me neither," says Cheryl, which isn't entirely true, and she pivots. "Well, I've got a weirdo uncle who always wants to do things. He's not even actually related to me."

"Family?" Angela asks, her voice going solemnly quiet.

"Dead," Cheryl replies, and slurps soda loudly through a straw to lighten the mood.

Angela is immune. "Sorry..."

"Yours, too?" The ‘all of them?’ goes unvoiced.

"No," Angela sighs. "Worse."

 _Worse than dead?_ "Oh, they're in a cult?"

Angela gives a start and regards Cheryl with real surprise. "How..."

"I've got some experience with those, too."

"I'm so sorry," Angela says again. Not the 'sorry for barfing in your car' kind of apology, but the 'I feel sorry _for_ you' kind. Cheryl usually hates those, but Angela is clearly more familiar with the former. She won’t _stop_ apologizing.

"Me, too," says Cheryl. "For your family, I mean. It's the worst."

"Yeah," Angela sighs, and picks at the plastic buttons on her soda lid. "I'm... better. Without them."

Cheryl thinks of her father, first. Eloquent, fussy, and practical. He'd move mountains for her and she'd do the same in return, if she could. The world is worse without him in it.

But if she'd been raised in that town...

"In that case, fuck them. Fuck your parents."

Angela jerks with surprise. "Um--"

"I mean it. You can tell your past self I said that." Cheryl pointedly meets Angela's eyes as she stuffs a wad of chicken breast into her mouth and chews silently.

Angela turns to look through the windshield. The rain is calmer than it was. "Maybe..."

Cheryl follows Angela's gaze through the windshield to a set of traffic lights on the road. The color changes. The cars proceed in a trail, like the trickles of rain down the passenger's side window.

_I can tell her what to write, but I don't know myself yet._

"All the assignments for group seem so stupid and juvenile, like the stuff they wanted us to do in grade school," Cheryl says, "but if I sit down and try to do them honestly, it's like I'm gouging my eyes out. I have to think about all this stuff I don't want to think about. I hate it." _And what would I even say to Heather? She was just living life and trying to enjoy herself until nothing that was ever her fault caught up to her. Maybe my letter would just be... a warning._

"It's like they always say," Angela says, her voice soft, "you might have to break a bone again to set it right. I think... that's why this stuff is s-so hard."

"Maybe I don't _want_ to break the bone again," Cheryl gripes, stuffing the last of her fries into her mouth before collecting the trash into the take-out bag. She knows the problem with what she's saying, but she says it anyway. "Maybe I was perfectly happy with it the way it was."

"But we were still broken," Angela's voice is barely over a whisper, "which is why we... did what... we did."

Cheryl sniffs petulantly. "I just wanted to be _normal._.. But I guess I never was."

"I don't think I know what _normal_ is..." Angela murmurs.

"Sure you do," Cheryl says. "You're doing it right now."

"Doing what?" Angela tilts her head in Cheryl's decision, but without looking her in the eye.

"Sitting around with another human being, having a conversation. This is some of the most normal stuff there is. The only next level up is movie theaters, shopping malls and amusement parks."

"Amusement Parks?" Angela echoes.

"Yeah just going out with your friends and letting loose. I don't like them much but... Well, it's been a long time since I went to one." When Cheryl looks at Angela, she's shaking her head almost imperceptibly. "You've never been to Six Flags?"

"No..."

Cheryl says it without thinking much. She's putting herself on the line for some of Angela's growth by doing it, but she says so anyway. "Let's go together. In the summer."

Angela jolts in her chair. "Me? You want to..."

"Yeah, let's go, if we don't hate each other by then," Cheryl gives Angela her best toothy smile that her old friends in high school told her looked aggressive, but it always felt right. "Group will be done if we behave ourselves, so we can go to celebrate."

Angela turns to stare through the windshield, blinking. She toys with the pull cords on the sleeves on her windbreaker. "You don't have to..."

"Promise?" Cheryl holds out her pinky finger rather than having a fight with Angela's self-worth.

Angela glances at Cheryl's hand, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. "But..."

"Promise or not?" Cheryl jerks her pinky finger insistently toward Angela.

Angela finally lifts her hand and, trembling, touches her pinky finger to Cheryl. "Okay..."

Cheryl hooks their fingers together and shakes. "It's a promise. You can't back out now!" _I'll have to make sure I don't flip out once I get there, but I don't need to tell her that. We'll make some new memories to replace my old ones._

Angela smiles, and even her smile seems sad.

* * *

Cheryl shows up to group on Monday with a cheesy letter written in her notebook telling her younger self that shit sucks and none of it was her fault, which she knew already. She had been brought to tears when she wrote that the world was unfair, and warned her past self to steel her heart to lose her father. Nothing ever seems to make that loss any easier. At least Douglas was willing to get on the phone on a Sunday night and reassure her that her memories weren't an elaborate fantasy. Maybe her trust in him is the problem, and maybe she should rely on him a little less, but if he's lying to her that means she's really, _really_ crazy, and she doesn't want to believe that.

She walks in twenty minutes late with the smell of nicotine on her fingers and her breath, opening the door with a bit too much enthusiasm so it slams against the back wall, making everyone jump. As the class settles back into their conversation and Cheryl moves to the empty seat beside Angela, Cheryl catches her staring in awe and wonder, her eyes shining with tears again.

"What's wrong?" Cheryl asks her, voice hushed so she doesn't disturb the conversation.

"Nothing," Angela sniffs and knuckles at her eyes. "I thought you wouldn't come."

"I have to come, or else they'll put me in jail," Cheryl is plain, but her voice betrays her concern. "Why wouldn't I?"

"It doesn't make any sense, I know," Angela whispers, struggling not to earn the attention of the class. She smiles, and this time it's real. "Thanks."

"You're welcome," Cheryl says, but not knowing why. Maybe she'll ask in the summer, on the highest point of a ferris wheel.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for this lovely prompt 100indecisions, and I really wish I'd had the time to do more with it! This has been a busy winter for me.
> 
> When going over the game I was really struck by the details of Heather's life. She likes a lot of girly things, like fashion and reading about the occult for fun, but does she actually have any friends? I've been reading a lot of japanese manga lately and it's very in line with the ideal stuff that teens get up to in those stories, so I liked imagining what she would want to do with her friends. Go to the beach, on a roadtrip, to an amusement park, and drag Angela along with her to make some memories. Somewhere, deep into that journey, they realize that they share a history with Silent Hill. Because why the hell would you talk about that place and all you experienced there unless it was with someone you really trusted?
> 
> Unfortunately, I didn't get to make this into a 20k roadtrip fic in a month, but I might expand on this idea later. What if this as a pre-relationship fic? That's a fun idea, but dang they've both got so many problems that it would probably get pretty ugly at times. Make sure you finish your therapy first, ladies.


End file.
